Business process management is describing business process activities which are performed to optimize a business process in an organization. A business process often involves access to information in one or more data sources of the organization. Business processes, as currently instantiated in business process management software, tend to be low-level operational in nature, i.e., the processes are rote and prescriptive, and executed by staff personnel. Management processes, on the other hand, are more ad hoc and near-real-time information-dependent.
Management participation in business processes is typically manual, e.g., verbal/written communications through email or voicemail. In cases where administrators want to include ‘data’ within an administrative form, such a form needs custom hand crafted data retrieval query using, e.g., structured query language (SQL).
Other existing solutions include sets of components that enable Java™ developers to quickly create custom solutions using Java Objects or Java Server Pages (JSPs). These can be tightly integrated with other applications or portals and by their nature involve writing and adapting programs.
Others have made the results of the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process more current, ensuring more up-to-date data is made available. However, this approach does not solve the problem of providing non-programmer users with suitable access to the data.
It is known to provide users with an indication that updating of the underlying database has taken place, thereby ensuring immediate results to multi-dimensional sophisticated queries for business process events occurring in near real time. However, there is no process of actually carrying out the queries and subsequent decision-making based on forms.
It is also known to provide analytics that give end users across an organization access to the information they need, directly in the context of their business processes so that these processes are more timely and up-to-date. This can be done by using a framework for guiding users through effective, repeatable decision-making processes. However, the processes so improved must be pre-defined and tend to involve interactions with many people or organizations. They do not address ad hoc or informal situations.
Business process systems are known where process activities and associated forms are provided in a computer-assisted environment. These systems require the users to provide all of the data deemed necessary to make decisions, thereby allowing room for error in inputting or transferring that data.
It is therefore desirable to provide a mechanism to overcome the latency of data, at the same time reducing errors in planning processes.